“Pastor, I want to be baptized.”
I didn't think that was a good idea!
“Marta, Jesus knows the desires of your heart. He knows that you want to be baptized. He accepts that, and you don’t have to be baptized. The thief on the cross beside Jesus would have been baptized if he could have, but he didn’t have the opportunity. Jesus understood, and promised him a place in heaven. Jesus reads your heart, too, Marta, and He will take you to heaven, even if you don’t get baptized.”
“Pastor,” Marta said to me with unusual power, “my faith is pushing me. Please baptize me.”
Marta had never attended our meetings, but she had heard every word I had said. Her house was close to the field where we were holding the evangelistic series, and she could easily hear my preaching over the loudspeakers. The students who were doing door-to-door visitation for the meetings had told me about her, and asked me to visit her when I could.
As soon as I walked into the dark and smoky mud hut where Marta was living with her sister, I knew that she would not be recovering from this disease. Marta was one of the millions in Africa who is infected with the AIDS virus. She lay on the floor, separated from the hard clay by a thin layer of grass straw and a thin sheet. She was covered with a blanket, but she looked cold and miserable. At one time, as the coughing from her secondary illness racked her body, her involuntary thrashing pulled off her tattered blanket, and under it I saw a body like I had only seen in National Geographic articles about famine-stricken people. At one point I saw her medical journal, in which some doctor had nearly-illegibly scribbled the letters H-I-V on the final page with writing. After that, no medical personnel cared to help her, and she was left to her own. She was a wasted and withered woman who teetered on the brink of the grave. She couldn’t move without assistance, and sometimes I thought she might die while I was watching.
But she didn’t die while I was there. She didn’t die during the meetings, and after I had spoken about baptism, she sent for me. She wanted to be baptized, and nothing could dissuade her. I told her that the decision was not mine, since I was not really a pastor. I would ask the real pastor about it when he came for the baptism.
As the pastor and I visited with Marta, he repeated what I had already told her. He gently explained to this sick and dying woman that Jesus could see her heart, and in her case, baptism was not a requirement for salvation. He talked about the thief on the cross, and told Marta that she was in a similar situation and would be accepted into heaven without being baptized. But again, she could not be convinced.
“Pastor, my heart is made up. I am ready. Please baptize me.”
With that, she started to pull back her blanket. I feared seeing her emaciated body once again, and started to turn away when I saw that Marta was clothed in a beautiful red dress! How could we refuse water, that she should be baptized?
We carried Marta to the car, and while the others walked to the river, we gently bumped along the dirt path. We had to walk quite a ways past the furthest place we could get with the car to reach the river. Beside where we stopped the car was a scum-covered pond. It was decided to baptize Marta there! I wanted to object, but knew that carrying her another kilometer to the river and then back again might be harder on her than the standing water would be, so I stayed silent.
As a deacon went ahead to clear away the green, bubbly scum from the deepest part of the water hole, another deacon carried Marta into the water, with the pastor beside. Two men held Marta and the pastor put his hands on her head as he pronounced the blessing over her.
“Marta, because you have decided to follow Jesus with your whole heart, and because nothing could stop you from being baptized, I baptize you in the name....”
The deacons lowered her under the water. We all knew that without their help to come up again, Marta would die in that water, unable to come to the surface on her own.
“Amen!,” yelled the onlooking group on the shore as she broke the surface in her dripping red dress.
We left Marta with a couple of friends beside the car while the rest of us went to the river. There 11 more precious people signified their commitment to follow Jesus by entering into a watery grave.
We drove Marta back to her home, gave her a Bible after the final meeting, and fully expected to hear that she would be gone within a few days. I was convinced that being in the cold, filthy water would hasten her death. Well, I’ve been wrong before and since, that, too!
The next Sabbath, Marta walked to church on her own! The distance was not long, but for a woman in her condition, it was a tremendous miracle! The Lord granted her strength for a whole month, during which time she met each Sabbath with her new family in the humble little church that had been built during the evangelistic series.
After that final month of greater strength and vitality, Marta’s condition rapidly deteriorated past what it had been before. I visited her a few times in her last weeks of life. I was sad to see her dying, but glad to know that she had found true life in Jesus, which nobody could take away from her.
We buried Marta in a small casket. I preached to those who gathered around the grave, pleading with them to make the same choice Marta had made. She will rise again, to inherit a new body, healthy and incorruptible.
Sometimes I wonder why we have chosen to be missionaries. Why go to a foreign country, surrounded by darkness of every kind, battling sickness and poverty and ignorance, able to do so little in the face of overwhelming circumstances? Then I remember Marta, and I stop wondering. There are more like her, and by the grace of God, we will be channels through whom He can reach some of them.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
12,000 people groups - one church at a time
We have lately been reading some powerful books on missions that have challenged our materialistic, consumerist tendencies. These books have helped us to see that as missionaries we are seeking to incarnate the living, giving God amidst those who do not know Him. Therefore, our attitude among the people we are working with should be one of giving, not of receiving, one of generosity, not of greed. Our attitude towards Christmas is different this year than it has been in the past, and we find it liberating to be more free of the desire to accumulate than we can remember being before.
“How long will you be in Africa?” This is a question we often hear. When we tell the one questioning us that our work in Africa is based on fulfilling the mission of planting a growing church among the Otammari people, and that AFM estimates that it will take 6 to 12 years, people are often astonished. “So long? Wow, you are really committed.”
Well, we don’t think we are so very committed, nor that 6 to 12 years is really so much time. We are going to work for the Otammari people, among whom the SDA church has already been planted to some degree. If our work stops there, then when it comes to taking the gospel to every people group on the planet, we have not really hastened the day of God at all. (See 2 Peter 3). There are still other groups around the Otammari that have no access to the gospel in their language or among their people group. In our minds, our work with the Otammari will be the opening door to help us learn how to reach other people groups, and to learn how to train local people to be missionaries to other people groups. We do not know what the future will hold, of course, but our hearts yearn for the unreached people groups of Africa to hear the everlasting gospel, and we are choosing to devote the rest of our lives to that task. We are choosing to give of ourselves and of our family to this great endeavor. We have prayed earnestly over our children, that they may be vessels used by God to reach the unreached.
There are still at least 12,000 ethnic groups in the world with no Seventh-day Adventist church among them. That is still around half of the world’s population with no access to somebody who can explain the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 to them in their own language. From the point of view of somebody who wants to be alive when Jesus returns, this is unacceptable! Because the Bible makes it clear, in Matthew 24:14 and Revelation 7:9, among other places, that there will be representatives from every people group in heaven, we still have a work left to do. Not we, as in Jason and Maggi, but we as in everybody who calls themselves by the name of Christ on this earth.
As we think of the work we will be doing among the Otammari people, of the friendships we will be forming, of the souls that we will hopefully lead to their Saviour, we also think of the bigger work left to be done. We wonder how it is that God is going to finish up the work He has promised to finish. We know He will use His church in some way, but we wonder how that will be. Thinking about 12,000 ethnic groups, or around three billion people, is more than any of us really manage to do. Perhaps only God can really think in such terms. For us, it is much easier to focus on one thing at a time. Instead of wondering how the whole world is going to be reached with the gospel, and getting overwhelmed as we see the immensity of the task, perhaps we should narrow our vision. What would happen if one local church, your local church perhaps, would focus on just one unreached people group? What if you and your church would study that people group, researching it in every possible way, until you became experts on that people group? What if you would then pray earnestly for God to show you somebody in your midst that He is choosing to go as cross-cultural missionaries to reach that group? Reaching 12,000 people groups is daunting, to say the least, but this would be doable, wouldn’t it? One church; one people group; one missionary team. That is not such a big task, really, is it?
This is the way I start to think as I wonder how God will go about finishing up His great work of salvation in the world. These are the kind of thoughts that Christmas-time stirs in my heart this year. I want to go home! I want to go to heaven. For us, our journey to Benin is just one step on the path in that direction.
“How long will you be in Africa?” This is a question we often hear. When we tell the one questioning us that our work in Africa is based on fulfilling the mission of planting a growing church among the Otammari people, and that AFM estimates that it will take 6 to 12 years, people are often astonished. “So long? Wow, you are really committed.”
Well, we don’t think we are so very committed, nor that 6 to 12 years is really so much time. We are going to work for the Otammari people, among whom the SDA church has already been planted to some degree. If our work stops there, then when it comes to taking the gospel to every people group on the planet, we have not really hastened the day of God at all. (See 2 Peter 3). There are still other groups around the Otammari that have no access to the gospel in their language or among their people group. In our minds, our work with the Otammari will be the opening door to help us learn how to reach other people groups, and to learn how to train local people to be missionaries to other people groups. We do not know what the future will hold, of course, but our hearts yearn for the unreached people groups of Africa to hear the everlasting gospel, and we are choosing to devote the rest of our lives to that task. We are choosing to give of ourselves and of our family to this great endeavor. We have prayed earnestly over our children, that they may be vessels used by God to reach the unreached.
There are still at least 12,000 ethnic groups in the world with no Seventh-day Adventist church among them. That is still around half of the world’s population with no access to somebody who can explain the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 to them in their own language. From the point of view of somebody who wants to be alive when Jesus returns, this is unacceptable! Because the Bible makes it clear, in Matthew 24:14 and Revelation 7:9, among other places, that there will be representatives from every people group in heaven, we still have a work left to do. Not we, as in Jason and Maggi, but we as in everybody who calls themselves by the name of Christ on this earth.
As we think of the work we will be doing among the Otammari people, of the friendships we will be forming, of the souls that we will hopefully lead to their Saviour, we also think of the bigger work left to be done. We wonder how it is that God is going to finish up the work He has promised to finish. We know He will use His church in some way, but we wonder how that will be. Thinking about 12,000 ethnic groups, or around three billion people, is more than any of us really manage to do. Perhaps only God can really think in such terms. For us, it is much easier to focus on one thing at a time. Instead of wondering how the whole world is going to be reached with the gospel, and getting overwhelmed as we see the immensity of the task, perhaps we should narrow our vision. What would happen if one local church, your local church perhaps, would focus on just one unreached people group? What if you and your church would study that people group, researching it in every possible way, until you became experts on that people group? What if you would then pray earnestly for God to show you somebody in your midst that He is choosing to go as cross-cultural missionaries to reach that group? Reaching 12,000 people groups is daunting, to say the least, but this would be doable, wouldn’t it? One church; one people group; one missionary team. That is not such a big task, really, is it?
This is the way I start to think as I wonder how God will go about finishing up His great work of salvation in the world. These are the kind of thoughts that Christmas-time stirs in my heart this year. I want to go home! I want to go to heaven. For us, our journey to Benin is just one step on the path in that direction.
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